Current practice

Donald joined the litigation group of Freehills in 1982 and was appointed a Partner in 1987. His major areas of practice include all aspects of competition and regulatory law.

Industry experience

Donald's range of experience includes:

• Advising on the legal aspects of business ventures and corporate conduct, and the application of competition law principles in the following areas:
  • joint ventures, strategic alliances and other collaborative activity
  • mergers and acquisitions
  • taking advantage of market power
  • distribution and other vertical arrangements
  • pricing behaviour
  • access issues
  • authorisations and notifications
  • investigations by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission
  • compliance
  • remedies and enforcement.
• Competitive analysis of business proposals.
• Negotiations and liaison with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission with respect to business ventures and alleged breaches of the Trade Practices Act.
• Working with economic and industry experts in the analysis of industries.
• Prosecuting and defending proceedings brought under the Trade Practices Act, 1974.
• Education with respect to the legal and economic aspects of competition policy.
• Economic analysis of law and the application of economic reasoning to legal problems.

Major projects and clients
Donald advises clients in a wide range of industries - both regulated and unregulated - including acting for:

• CBA in the takeover of Colonial, a $10 billion merger, requiring negotiation with the ACCC with respect to the merger and entry into Section 87B undertakings
• Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and ANZ Bank in relation to collaboration and joint ventures in the logistics and cash exchange services market
• VISA with respect to the economics of payment systems networks, and in particular the setting of interchange rates, the honour all cards rule, the no discrimination rule and the balanced portfolio rule – negotiating with the ACCC and assisting in the preparation of submissions to the Reserve Bank of Australia study of credit and debit card markets
• Billiton in relation to competition aspects of BHP Billiton dual listed company merger
• Qantas in the original Qantas/British Airways authorisation in relation to the Kangaroo route
• Network Seven generally and specifically in relation to sporting and media markets concerning the AFL rights
• the Australian Stock Exchange in relation to various competition and regulatory issues, including structural and market data pricing issues
• acting for Adsteam Marine in respect to the dispute with the Port of Bunbury Authority in relation to natural monopoly markets and bidding markets
• Austar in the telecommunications market, including joint venture and access disputes and regulatory reform of the market
• Telecom Corporation of NZ with respect to various transactions and proposed transactions in the telecommunications market
• Maynes in the health and logistics businesses.
  
  

Professional background

Donald is the author of a number of contributions to legal journals and other publications including the Competition and Consumer Law Journal and the Australian Business Law Review on a variety of topics. He is a contributor of the entries on Trade and Commerce, Equity, Estoppel and Trusts to Butterworths Australian Legal Dictionary (1997).

Donald makes presentations at a number of conferences and seminars on competition law and law and economics. He also lectures in postgraduate courses in competition law at the University of Sydney Law School. In 2000, he co-presented a postgraduate law course on Comparative Competition Law at the University of Sydney Law School.

Within the firm, Donald is also:

• National Co-ordinator of the Competition Law Practice Group
• responsible for instituting training programs in economics for competition lawyers
• co-ordinator of the Competition Law Interest Group which discusses recent trends and issues in competition and regulatory law
• one of the editors and contributors to Directions in Competition Law, a regular firm publication dealing with issues and trends in competition and regulatory law.

A graduate of the University of Sydney with First Class Honours degrees in both Economics and Law, Donald won the Randolph G. Rouse Prize as top graduate in his Economics Honours year and was awarded, among other prizes, a WA Cooke Scholarship in Law. He also holds a Master of Laws degree from Columbia University, New York, where he was the Robert Burton Fellow and the Centre for Law and Economics Studies Fellow.

In 1995-96 he was Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University Law School, Chicago.